All presumptions about Iran are drawn down as we witness people just like us battered – but what about the other Iran?

By James Mills

What has struck me most about the demonstrations in Iran following the elections is the use of the Internet by those involved in the protests. Iranian friends of mine either here or in Iran have used Facebook and Twitter to disperse the videos and photographs of what is going on in Tehran faster than the news channels can broadcaste them. The images of women beaten by men with batons and other men lying on the streets with gaping wounds and bloodied bodies in their unedited form really is unlike anything I have seen before. They are the 21st century pamphleteers of our day, except they create ‘real-time’ coverage of these demonstrations that are happening thousands of miles away. One thing in particular that stands out while watching these online videos is the amount of people in the background. I picture them as if I’m the director of the video, running around holding aloft a camera or mobile phone and capturing the events taking place.

When I have shown these clips to colleagues I work with, the first response they have is at how relative the events unraveling before their eyes appear by the fact that those leading these demonstrations are similar in age and attire to themselves. Seeing police violence in a Middle Eastern country, as many of them comment, is not a new occurrence and they feel rather hardened towards such images.

But the difference here, they say, is that when they see an English speaking twenty-something woman wearing converse shoes and denim jeans pleading with a policeman not to club her with his baton, they find their vale of ignorance penetrated in a rather uncomfortable way. They of course remember images of the G20 riots in London where a policeman struck a woman with a baton, but that act was unique in its context. Before them they see all their presumptions of Iran that they had been led to believe about “hijab wearing religious zealots” (as one coworker described them) torn apart and stood before them are young people just like themselves.

The vanguard and general rank and file of these demonstrations are the more well healed, middle class, western orientated, English speaking Iranians. They wear our latest fashions, are well versed in our media culture and even use our colloquial language. They do not represent the nether-regions of the Iranian masses struggling with the day-to-day poverty they face. Take into consideration that unemployment in Iran is at 12 percent, inflation around 27 percent and the typical salary is around 300 dollars a month; match to this the fact that 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and one begins to see that despite being the second largest oil producer, with among the largest oil reserves in the world, Iran is not a wealthy nation. Ahmadinejad tapped into these worries among the urban poor in 2005 and was elected on a ticket promising to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, to hold down prices and to increase salaries.

Furthermore, to say that there were no signs that Mr. Amadinejad was in the running and that Mr. Mousavi was blazing away in the polls is just inacurate. Rajanews, admittedly a news agency linked to Mr. Ahmadinejad, was claiming he was leading in the polls in the major cities, and Alef News ran a poll days before the election that put Mr. Ahmadinejad on over 60%. Also, one of the newspapers owned by one of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s rivals Mehdi Karroubi, Etemad-e-Melli, polled Ahmadinejad as in first place only a month before the election. More than likely it represents the fact that for the average Iranian, as a BBC poll back in January showed, the issues most important for them are those concerning the economy than with tensions with the West or political reform. Of those surveyed by the BBC, 45 percent responded that unemployment and poverty were their biggest concerns. More surprisingly, what this poll also showed was that more than half believed their country was heading in the right direction.

When one weighs up these facts it is not so surprising that a demagogue and a windbag like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has won the election. What is surprising, however, is the level to which he has increased his share of the vote. The latter is what is fuelling the screams of “Marg-ba dicktator” arising from the rooftops in Tehran.